Entry-Level Coaching

The unglamorous life of a college assistant can yield better opportunities down the road.

Andrea Grove-McDonough's success at UConn landed her a job at Iowa State.

John Oliver knows how to make Gatorade. First, he cleans the cooler. Then he empties the powder packet and adds the correct amount of water and ice. Then he mixes. It may not seem like a big deal, but it is to Oliver, or at least it was in 2009. Making the Gatorade was his first responsibility as a 23-year-old graduate assistant coach for Syracuse University's cross country team.

For many entry-level assistant coaches in the NCAA, the grunt work–providing sports drink, driving team vans to a long-run site or checking that athletes get their equipment–is commonplace. So are 70-hour weeks. The duties may seem tedious, but without the work of assistant coaches, many teams couldn't function as smoothly as they do.

But what's in it for the assistant? Do these jobs help young people learn to coach?

"I wasn't a good runner," says Oliver, who ran at North Central College, a Division III school in Naperville, Ill.

"I never was. But I knew I wanted to get into coaching." So when Syracuse offered him the position in 2009, he jumped at it. His pay? Free classes toward a master's degree in exercise science, which he completed in 2011, and a small stipend.

Although his tasks were menial, the year was one of Syracuse cross country's best. The men's team won their first Big East title, and both the men's and women's squads qualified for nationals. Oliver says he was lucky to be a part of it. He was, he says, "just trying to figure out how not to screw up.

Coaching is about 90 percent administrative work, according to Oliver. The other 10 percent, the workouts and race plans, are essential, but they're usually left to the head coaches. The key for assistants is to prove their worth at the unglamorous tasks–while also learning how to design programs and run effective practices–so when the time comes, they're prepared for a bigger role.

Oliver took on more responsibilities at Syracuse, including taking an athlete to the U.S. cross country championships in 2012.

Later that year he accepted an assistant coaching job at Stanford University under Chris Miltenberg, the director of track and field. (Miltenberg got his start as a graduate assistant at Columbia University before moving to Georgetown University and then Stanford.)

Oliver is still handling tasks like travel and NCAA compliance issues, but he is also coordinating recruiting. For now, he's not worried about his next job, he says; he's just trying to help the team operate at its best.

Even top runners find it's not always easy to make a smooth transition to college coaching. In 2007, Andrea Grove-McDonough, then 34, was a volunteer assistant at the University of Montana, but she mostly ran with the team and didn't do any of what she calls "real coaching." A two-time Canadian national champion (once at 10K on the roads, once at 10,000m on the track), she wanted to get into serious coaching as her competitive career was winding down.

She applied for jobs across the country–and got no responses. Only Walt Drenth at Michigan State University contacted her about an assistant coaching spot, but she didn't get the job. Kim McGreevy did, which left a position open at the University of Connecticut. Grove-McDonough didn't wait for the job to be posted; she picked up the phone and called the UConn coach. It worked. She got the job, retired from running and jumped right into coaching.

"In the ideal scenario," she says, "I would have been an assistant under a distance coach to learn the ropes and get my feet wet." Instead, she was in charge of the women's distance runners. "I was the director of ops, the recruiting coordinator, I was doing the paperwork and travel," she says. "It was a crazy, sort of overwhelming experience."

Under Grove-McDonough, however, the program thrived, earning its first-ever ranking in 2011 and taking eighth place at the 2012 NCAA meet. Now Grove-McDonough is in her first year as the head women's cross country coach at Iowa State University, a position that allows her to focus on workouts and recruiting.

Still, she is grateful for all that she learned in her first few years of coaching and every task she had to master. If you want to be a head coach, you should know all the ins and outs of how the program operates, including what it's like to drive the vans, order lunches and manage equipment. Says Grove-McDonough: "It's invaluable to know every aspect of your business." For many, that starts with making the Gatorade.